Quick Cryptic Number 165 by Izetti

Author   william_j_sPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
This is quite a tricky puzzle, in my opinion, which makes use of some archaic and unusual words. I got almost all the way there before having to resort to the internet for 18dn. It’s easy to forget how many neat clues there are, and how much fun you’ve had solving them, when the last 15 frustrating minutes are spent searching in vain! I hope I’m not the only one…

Given the esteem in which today’s setter is rightly held, I am sure you will take my comments below as cries for help not quibbles!

Definitions underlined.

Across
1 GARB – attire from an anagram of BRAG (to boast). Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I have until now assumed that only one step should be required to solve the wordplay. Here we have to find a synonym of boast and then rearrange its letters (indicated by about). It’s not an anagram, but a straight reversal (thanks to commenters below).
4 SCOTTIES – STIES are filthy places, put COT (bed) inside for dogs.
8 SCARIEST – most likely to cause a fright and an anagram of ACTRESS I (indicated by fancy).
9 ANTI – some of importANT Information gives opponent.
10 HIGH – homophone of “Hi” (greeting, heard) and on a mountain maybe? .
11 GLEANING – the practice of gathering crops, etc. from land that has already been commercially harvested, therefore, work at harvest time. Apparently, this used to serve as a basic welfare system. G (good) + LEANING (inclination).
12 TEASEL – to guy is to TEASE, with L (lake) for this plant.
14 PURPLE – this colour comes from PL (abbreviated or little place) with PURE (clean) around the outside.
16 ABSTRACT – double definition. A summary (of a journal paper, for example, and hard to understand.
18 HUGE – enormous from HUG (embrace) with E (energy).
19 GAOL – LAG backwards (returning prisoner) around O (holding nothing) give his institution (i.e. where you would find a prisoner).
20 TICKLING – TICK (little creature) seen by LING (heather) for amusing.
22 STOREYED – with a number of floors is the sneaky definition. STORE (shop) + YE’D (contraction of archaic you had).
23 TEST – regular letters of ThEy SaT for an exam.

Down
2 ARCHIVE – record from I’VE under ARCH (vault, on a ceiling).
3 BERTH – our second homophone, this time of “birth” (what may happen in maternity hospital) for bed.
4 SUE – instigate legal proceedings against, and the name of a woman.
5 ON THE SPOT – can mean both at the scene of an event and immediately (as in, on the spot fine).
6 TRAINER – coach from TRAIN (puff-puff?) + ER (hesitation).
7 EATEN – another homophone. Worried (e.g. what’s eating you now?) sounds like “Eton” (public school).
11 GALLANTRY – polite respect from GALL (bitterness) followed by A N (new) and TRY (attempt).
13 SETTLER – double definition. Person who pays (settles a bill) and colonist.
15 LEGENDS – LEG (member) + ENDS (finishes) for folk stories.
17 BEAST – BEST (most appropriate) contains (imprisons) A for a cruel person.
18 HELOT – Lord’s servant (of the manor, rather than on high) is HE (high explosive) with LOT (man from the Book of Genesis). I could not even guess this with any confidence, and it took some effort to unravel this morning.
21 COD – this fish is CO{l}D (not hot) taking out L (left).

27 comments on “Quick Cryptic Number 165 by Izetti”

  1. re 1ac: indirect anagrams are usually frowned upon in The Times.. but this is not an anagram, just a reversal, so that would be OK..
  2. I think I was heading for a pb, but was slowed down by 12ac, where after giving up on guy=person, I went on to guy=stay, and finally remembered guy=tease (and that there is in fact a plant called a teasel). Nothing odd about GARB, William; it’s legit to have a synonym that is then reversed. What you can’t do is have a synonym that is then anagrammatized. I got HELOT from checkers, having been misled by ‘Lord’s servant’; I was under the impression that helots were specifically Spartan slaves. On edit: I just Googled ‘helot’, and by George I’m right; fancy that. 5:20.
    Here’s a link to Millet’s famous ‘The Gleaners’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3mt7AiAtw

    Edited at 2014-10-24 08:01 am (UTC)

  3. I was heading for a PB by a massive margin but my inability to spell GAOL correctly slowed me right down and doubled my time to 20 mins because I could not find a word that fitted 17D with an O in the middle. And it took me 10 mins to realise the problem lay with my spelling rather than my vocabulary.

    I do like these ‘names of colour’ clues. I can do them. Much more accessible than cricket ones.

  4. This was a bit of an odd one for me. Struggled to make much headway at all on first pass through, then got 90% of it in a rush and then struggled for a while with GALLANTRY and GLEANING before totally giving up on HELOT – just did not know it, and could not make it out from the rest of the clue.

    Thanks, as always, to setter and blogger.

  5. About 6 minutes (I forgot to turn on the online stopwatch today). HELOT was tricky (though I know the word, the religious context ‘did me in the flight’) but PURPLE my last in. Thnaks to William for explaining the ‘immediate’ meaning of ‘on the spot’. And to Don, as ever, for an enjoyable challenge
  6. 19 minutes, so another at the harder end of the spectrum for me today. HELOT would never have come to my mind in a non-cryptic puzzle, but I got the answer from wordplay and then remembered the word.

    YE and its associated forms usually come with some mention of its being old or archaic even in then main puzzle, so it seems a bit harsh for it not to do so in a Quickie.

    GLEANING was the subject of a lengthy discussion quite recently in the 15×15 so those who read that will have started with an advantage today.

    William, you have a stray ‘d’ at 4dn.

  7. I shared William’s experience except with a different answer. Seemed to shoot through the rest but got completely stuck on 12ac and ended up resorting to t’interweb. So what could have been a sub 8 minute turned into a DNF.
  8. 4 mins. I thought that this was one of the easier Izetti QCs. I didn’t have a problem with HELOT but I struggled to see the ABSTRACT/BEAST crossers.
  9. 5 minutes, as fast as I can type into their annoying grid. Put in TEASEL without knowing guy could mean tease, but the rest seemed clear.
  10. Seem to have lost my password so can’t sign in at the moment. Have decided to call it a day on the quick cryptic I am never going to get more than 50% and frankly find the use of obsolete language and terms too frustrating. Found today’s very difficult as well as yesterday’s and hardly think they are encouraging to novices. The blogs are very good but since all the comments seem to illustrate people who do the puzzles in less than 10-15 minutes I don’t believe these really are for novices. To the bloggers thanks for the time you give to this, I suspect you are under appreciated.
    1. I’m sad to read your comment and that of the other anon below, but I don’t know quite what sort of puzzle you expect to find that would suit you.

      This may be a good time to refer to the Editor’s comments published on the first day of the Quick Cryptic. I’m hoping we can put up a permanent link to it on TftT for future reference, but in the meantime it’s available as a temporary measure here:
      http://jackkt.livejournal.com/

      Edited at 2014-10-24 10:54 pm (UTC)

  11. I agree that often these are not for beginners, and it really does not much encouragement to us learners to keep hearing on a daily basis how quickly clever clog experts do them in
    1. I had never done a cryptic crossword until the end of June. I started because I was trapped in the eurotunnel with a colleague (who adores cryptic crosswords) who had no newspaper, and I’d finished all the number puzzles in mine. So he suggested we look at the crossword together, and I have never felt so thick. So I decided that honour demanded I learn how to do these. I feel that the times quick has definitely been a magnificent learning ground, and as others have mentioned, the blogs are just genius for helping beginners. I was ridiculously pleased that my emergency ‘supply blog’ got used yesterday because for me, it demonstrated how far I’ve come in 4 months. The fact that it took me half an hour to do yesterday’s puzzle and 20 mins to do today’s when it takes some people 4 minutes is of course a bit chastening – but since I don’t intend to give up my only option is to plug on. I will never be able to do a crossword in 4 minutes because typing on the iPad isn’t easy for me (dyspraxic) but I would like to think I could get down to about 10 mins consistently in due course. I’m regarding this a a long term project, I haven’t even attempted the full times solo except at weekends when I have no option. I do try the grain full cryptic every day, and some days I complete it, most days I don’t, but I do believe I’m getting (slowly) better. I guess I’m just saying – don’t give up. The people who can do it in 4 mins are obviously very very good but they didn’t start out doing them in 4 mins.
    2. Well said faceofboe and I seem to have read similar comments re.the main puzzle blog. But, if people get upset at times being posted, as they say, the clue is in the name Time for the Times . I usually check the main blog after my attempts at the main puzzle, but gave up worrying about how much slower I was than the contributors there, as I enjoy the solving experience and am happy to spend some time working the grey cells.

      But I have some sympathy for the two anons, as I’m not sure the balance has been struck so that new solvers feel they can achieve a good result a reasonable proportion of the time. If the Quickies are occasionally a real stroll, then the better solvers have always got the main crossword to follow.

  12. My experience was very like chrisw91. I had most of the clues on first pass and there I was thinking it was a very straightforward puzzle. Then ground to a halt at the 12ac, 16ac and 13dn intersection. Once I saw ABSTRACT, SETTLER followed quickly but still couldn’t get 12ac. Didn’t know the connection tease=guy and had never heard of Teasel, so I guess I was on a hiding to nothing 🙁 Many thanks for the enlightenment william_j_s.
  13. I was happily gloating at finishing in 21 mins till I reaLised, on reading William’s excellent blog, that I’d missed the soundalike in 2dn & entered BIRTH not BERTH.

    RATS!!!

    My COD was LEGENDS – well-used family pun – particularly since my op!!

    LOI was TEASEL as I wasn’t sure of the alternative spelling & wasn’t very comfy with guy = tease.

    1. Actually, I would imagine that 15D was difficult for anyone who has read the Song of Ice and Fire books to complete with a straight face. Tormund giant’s bane has a lot to answer for.
  14. I thoroughly agree with times not being appropriate to the quick cryptic. Obviously it is not an issue in the main crossword, but is demoralising when you’ve spend 45 mins to complete it and you find the main crossword experts have knocked it off in a few minutes.
  15. Couldn’t finish this one (Teasel and Helot) after 40 minutes effort. As a relative novice I have some sympathy with the frustration expressed above. Probably more than most this was a quick crossword for experts but there were too many archaic/obscure terms for the novice. However not all are like this (eg some quickies have quite a few anagrams). I view the occasional one like this as a learning exercise.
  16. Well said, Tony. Don Manley is a top-class setter who will never willingly ‘dumb down’, which is great for the integrity of the Times puzzles going forward, in my opinion.

    My excuse for giving times is that I don’t record them anywhere else. When I started using TfTT five years ago, the practice by some bloggers was to miss one (often more) clue out. You can imagines how chastened I felt when with stunning regularity the solution too easy to give – let alone comment on- was the one I couldn’t get. But I asked for enlightenment all the same and gained ground more quickly than I would ever have felt possible.

    Personally, I think it’s a Good Thing that some of what Nick calls the senior pros comment here with the less experienced solvers. I reckon it would be a pity if there was a sharp bifurcation between the two daily write-ups. On the blog for the main puzzle some of us tease firmer champions when they have ‘a terribly slow day’, coming in at 9:46 minutes. Maybe folk can adopt a similar approach here.

    On a final note, I was really pleased to hear faceofboe’s testimony. Maybe other people who fancy doing an occasional blog (which is a tremendously helpful discipline) can contact a regular blogger and offer their services for such occasions as holiday cover. Even without having admin rights, there are ways to get the blog up, as we saw yesterday.

  17. I know I will never be a scratch golfer (or play off a single figure handicap for that matter). Does that mean I give up playing the game? Hell no – I adjust my aspirations and hope one day to come in at 16 over: I’d get as much satisfaction out of that as Tiger would with an 8 under round, I’m sure.

    It’s all about whether you enjoy the game. If you do, then the fact that there are others who are significantly better at it than you are does not matter a jot. If you don’t, there’s always basket weaving…

  18. I, too, started in June and the times entered by elite solvers irritate. As does, frankly, the elasticity over meanings – abstract does NOT mean difficult. One person’s difficult is another’s easy. I’ve never found abstract difficult, but i do find the quick cryptic so – 40 mins for 90%. Perhaps crosswords are only for ‘insiders’ and this one is not to encourage new solvers, which woukd be a shame.
  19. Started the TQC recently when the [so-so] RT subscription expired for the final time – having a while back resigned myself to being able to do the Telegraph most of the time and complete the TC almost never. The TQC has been a welcome incentive to try again. Glad to say that I can now finish most of these, but still languish in the “put it down after the first attempt and enjoy the later revelations at the second or third go” – so am not troubling the stopwatch keeper for the moment.

    Thanks for the link to the introductory note. I would say to the editor “mission accomplished”.

  20. I thought HE might be His Excellency + Lot
    I also had Befit being appropriate as apposed to beast not that it made a difference to anything else.
    And I put in ‘Hiya’ as homophone instead of ‘High’ for 10 across which threw me for a bit

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